Week 2 Tuesday

Summary:

Continued reading the rest of the articles and working on marking up the tutorial slides. Read “Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Instructional Approach”, “An Innovative Approach with Alice for Attracting K-12 Students to Computing”, “Integrating Animations into Courses”, “Tools for Teaching Introductory Programming: What Works?”, “Alice: A 3-D tool for Introductory Programming Concepts”, “Using Visualization to Teach Novices Recursion”, “Using 3D Animation Programming in a Core Engineering Course Seminar”, “Developing Algorithmic Thinking With Alice”, and “Objects: Visualization of Behavior and State”. Tutorials I managed to finish marking up were the 4 part “Getting Started’ tutorials and the Light Tutorial.

Thoughts:

The articles focused much more on Alice which I enjoyed. It was interesting to read arguments for Alice when it came to CS concepts such as algorithmic design and recursion. There were also a lot of papers dealing with using Alice to improve retention rate and increase the diversity of CS majors by attracting women and underrepresented minorities. I could identify with many of the comments and scenarios. I never programming in high school, didn’t know what Computer Science was until college when, on a whim, I signed up for the DES seminar/compsci 4 program. I think that a lot of the factors that they list that prevent women from entering (such as a preformed notion of whether they are or are not good at computer science) pin a lot of us dead on. That was really interesting to read and obviously the Alice approach worked on me, though there were other factors too.

I think algorithmic design could be a bigger part of the tutorials. Many of the tutorials don’t give a big picture of what is going on in the world, what the ultimate goal for creation is. By outlining the problem and the goals at the beginning—for example we want to create a world that does such and such, and then walking through the user in each individual step—the tutorial mimics the brainstorming/storyboarding process. To some degree the tutorials already do this but it isn’t very clear and it’s only in certain instances. Looking at alot of the worlds created, especially by the children, the code is usually in one big block. Teaching more of the reasoning behind grouping methods and just program design could be a larger hitting point I think. The article on recursion was also fascinating because from what I learned in later CS courses, Alice really does not have a true model of recursion but the idea of calling a method in itself you can do but even with learning it in CS4, recursion was still very hard to grasp in 6 and 100. Maybe a tutorial talking about the uses in Alice and implications could be useful. The article mentioned that recursion was useful because there was no while loop—in the new version of Alice there is a while loop and so a lot of the examples used in the article are no longer relevant. Updated situations could be helpful.

Hours: 8